The Poetry Hour

I'd hoped that I would have something I've been working on completed for the anniversary of 11 September. It now doesn't seem that I will. Perhaps with concerted effort tomorrow I may manage but don't hold your breath.

In lieu thereof here's something I wrote about two and half years ago related to other momentous events:

mesopotamia

from the land between the rivers
the dead fly home
a dull procession of flag draped boxes
buried in the bellies of the beasts of war
obscured from view
unnoticed

yet someone knows
widows and mothers
yet someone grieves
sisters and brothers
yet someone weeps in the still of night
children and fathers

while talking heads
ramble on about a safer world
these newly dead
return to towns with names that sing america,
that offer up the innocents once again

under autumn leaves whose colours blaze in death
red eyed children cling hard to mothers,
bewildered and unfathered,
in stiff, unfamiliar shoes
that leave trails of woe in the morning dew

they must watch,
though they would rather play,
as their fathers,
at once old and young,
slowly slip into familiar clay

from the land between the rivers
the dead fly home
obscured from view
but not forgotten